Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Does This Sound Like You?
You're alone, successful, and the clock is ticking. You're still young; you are liberated and complex. You want your brains respected and your feelings cherished by a man you respect and cherish. You want to join with this man in a partnership of thoughts, feelings, and mutual life goalshome, family, and an interesting career. You have dated men who seem right in the beginning, but then it all falls apart ... usually within the first year. Sometimes you break free, and other times you stay too long.
You find yourself envying women with men you wouldn't want, who are mothers of unbearable kids who live in houses you hate -- why? You think of marrying that nice, boring man your accountant fixed you up with, or the man you met in the grocery store who knew the price of every item, and suddenly you feel sick in the pit of your stomach -- why?
You work more, hoping the money will feel good. You travel with your single/divorced women friends only to spend the time trying to catch a man. Or maybe you have a rare date with the "perfect" guy, but he just doesn't call back. You may still be with that married man who promises to leave his boring wife but never does.
You try to settle for that reasonably attractive associate professor of philosophy with the bright conversation and the clipout coupons for two-for-one dinners, but you just can't. Why?
Why People Arent Getting And Staying Married
Dr. Carl Jung said that every man has a feminine, feeling side, and every woman has a masculine, thinking side, but until the 1960s, men who had to go out into the world to become"breadwinners" repressed their feminine side, while women who married and became "homemakers" repressed their masculine side. In those days, traditional values still prevailed in dating, courtship, and marriage. Premarital sex was frightening because of the risk of pregnancy. Abortions were illegal, dangerous, and inaccessible to many. Divorce was still a scandal, and good women obeyed their husbands.
But in the early 1970s, the feminist movement communicated for the first time on a mass scale that "maleness," or the male qualities that represented success, was something that could be actively pursued by women. Money, power, independence, and prestige were all within a woman's grasp and for the first time represented something that could be realistically achieved without sacrificing cultural values. What was sacrificed were the traditional roles of male and female that had for generations been the foundation of successful relationships. In fact, women became ashamed -- and understandably so, given their new acculturation -- of being satisfied with the traditional female role.
Instead of just becoming "housewives," secretaries, or teachers, women also became managers, lawyers, college professors, and corporation presidents, just as men, not coincidentally, began releasing a more loving, gentle, and sensitive side of their nature. In Jungian terms, both women and men had begun to develop both sides of their true selves, the masculine as wen as the feminine.
Soon there were no rules of behavior particular to the male or the female in a romantic relationship. He could call her, or she could call him. She could pay for the date, or he could, or they could split it. He could pursue her, or she could pursue him. She could initiate sex, or he could. Free love was in. Commitment was out. Equality was the name of the game! Soon relationships became a kind of battleground on which men and women sought equal status, equal degrees of power and prestige.
If this were restricted to the boardroom, it would represent only a broadening of the field of combat-but, not surprisingly, it entered the bedroom as well. With both men and women vying for the same position, the courtship dance was abandoned to two partners struggling for the lead. In the process, we forgot how to make love to one another.
Then, with the onset of AIDS, things changed again. Free love was out; sexual responsibility was in. Commitment, monogamy, stability, and marriage became more desired and valued. Women began to realize that it wasn't just sex and success they wanted; they yearned for a husband and children-in other words, a family. But how were they to find it? Few knew how to get into a relationship, much less stay in one.
Grim statistics tell us that a small percentage of women over thirty will marry. Exactly half the marriages that are performed are doomed to end in divorce. What is almost as bad is the number of relationships that self-destruct before ever reaching the altar, before ever having the chance to beat those odds.
But you can beat the odds.
Do You Want It All, Or Are You Wiling To Compromise To Get Him?
Freud, at the end of his career, asked the question "What do women want?" The answer most appropriate today is "everything," and that is exactly what is wrong. Women (and men) who want it all end up with nobody to love.
In today's society, healthy men and women are so ambisexual, so fully both male and female, that they seem not to need each other anymore. Women can earn a living and live alone; men can cook and live alone. Nobody has to get married to have sex. Serial monogamy, which is a series of short-term, monogamous romances, is now the major relating formula of the day, and narcissism the predominant personality disorder.
There is nothing wrong with healthy narcissism, because it means that each of us has the right to be a total person, with both male and female qualities. We each have the right to think and to feel. We each have a right to our own body. We have the right to be an individual, separate from all others. So we have advanced to the place where we can be all by ourselves if we want to be. The problem is, how do we get together?
Getting to 'I Do'. Copyright © by Pat Allen. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
